Mary Lasker

At three or four she walked with her mother to visit the family laundress in Watertown, Wisconsin, a woman who had just had both breasts removed for cancer. Her mother explained on the way over what a mastectomy was. Mary Woodard remembered the woman's children crowding around the bed and her own indignation, and she named that afternoon as the origin of everything after it. Her mother campaigned for parks and taught her that civic things could be moved. She studied art history at Radcliffe, did postgraduate work at Oxford, dealt modern French paintings in New York, and in 1940 took a second husband, Albert Lasker, who had built a fortune inventing modern advertising. What she took from him was not the money but the method.

The American Society for the Control of Cancer was sleepy until the Laskers took it apart, ousted its board, and rebuilt it in 1945 as the American Cancer Society, committed to spending a quarter of what it raised on research. Then she turned to Congress. With Florence Mahoney she cultivated Senator Lister Hill and Representative John Fogarty, testified, and organized. The National Institutes of Health budget was 2.4 million dollars in 1945. It passed a billion within twenty years and reached 5.5 billion by 1985. She was called the most powerful lobbyist in Washington who had never held office.

Scientists fought her, and some still do. Her instrument was the disease-specific institute and the targeted appropriation: money voted for cancer, for heart disease, for mental health, because those were the words that moved voters. Basic researchers argued that cures do not arrive on schedule, that nobody could direct a cell to give up its secrets by act of Congress, and that money aimed at named diseases starved the undirected work from which the actual answers came. The 1971 National Cancer Act she pushed through, sold as a war on cancer with campaign rhetoric promising a cure by the 1976 bicentennial, became the case in point, and biologists have spent fifty years citing it. Her reply never changed. Public money follows public urgency, and the alternative to a campaign was no money at all.

The Lasker Awards are the thing that carried her name furthest. She and Albert founded them in 1942, and they became known as America's Nobels, and a genuine predictor of the real thing. By 2015, 87 Lasker laureates had gone on to a Nobel. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969, and Congress voted her a Gold Medal in 1987, presented in 1989. She had meanwhile spent decades planting Washington, sending Lady Bird Johnson daffodil bulbs for the Potomac parkways and azaleas and dogwood for Pennsylvania Avenue. She died on February 21, 1994, at 93, and left more than 10 million dollars to the foundation.

Mary Lasker's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation other
  Founded with her husband to promote medical research 1942
• The Lasker Awards other
  First given in 1945 and now often called America's Nobels 1945
• The American Cancer Society other
  Rebuilt out of the American Society for the Control of Cancer 1945
• National Mental Health Act law
  The first big win of the Lasker lobby, and the origin of the NIMH 1946
• National Heart Act law
  Created the National Heart Institute 1948
• National Cancer Act of 1971 law
  The war on cancer, and the most contested thing she drove through 1971

• 1923 aged ~23 Graduates from Radcliffe with a degree in art history After a year at the University of Wisconsin and before postgraduate study at Oxford.
• June 22, 1940 aged 39 Marries Albert Lasker He told her that only the federal government could fund medical research at scale. She replied that she knew nobody in government.
• 1942 aged ~42 The Laskers found the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation
• 1945 aged ~45 The American Society for the Control of Cancer is remade as the American Cancer Society The Laskers ousted the board and pushed a quarter of all money raised into research.
• July 3, 1946 aged 45 Truman signs the National Mental Health Act The Lasker and Mahoney lobby had its first federal institute.
• 1952 aged ~52 Albert Lasker dies of colon cancer She ran the campaign alone for the next forty years.
• 1969 aged ~69 Receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom
• December 23, 1971 aged 71 Nixon signs the National Cancer Act The war on cancer. Scientists have argued about it ever since.
• February 21, 1994 aged 93 Dies at 93, leaving more than 10 million dollars to the foundation

• Sidney Farber 1903–1973
  The first remissions in childhood leukemia, and the Jimmy Fund allied with
• Lyndon B. Johnson 1908–1973
  36th President who signed the Civil Rights Act and launched the Great Society programs. lobbied
• Richard Nixon 1913–1994
  37th President whose foreign policy achievements were overshadowed by the Watergate scandal. lobbied
• Jonas Salk 1914–1995
  Medical researcher who developed the first safe and effective polio vaccine. praised by
• Francis Collins b. 1950
  Led the public Human Genome Project and directed the National Institutes of Health built the agency he led